Muslim lives matter

This has been trending because of the Chapel Hill murders in which a white male shot three Muslim college students in their apartment.

Apparently, the shooting was motivated by a parking dispute. But Hicks, an avid atheist, has been known to show up at his neighbor’s doors complaining with a gun on his belt.

The shooting has ignited a fierce debate online about whether the crime was motivated by the students’ faith.

Voices on Twitter and other social media outlets expressed their concern on the lack of media coverage, possibly due to the students being Muslim.

The story even caught the attention of the president.

“No one in the United States of America should ever be targeted because of who they are, what they look like, or how they worship,” said Obama.

Ironically enough, it has reached a national level with stories on NBC, BBC, Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times, and most other news outlets.

A majority of these stories center on the fact that the students were Muslim and on Hicks’ motive.

Since 9/11, America’s opinions on Muslims have become a sensitive topic. With the influx of hate-crimes and general ire towards Muslims following the catastrophic event, their unfair treatment over the years have become a huge source of controversy.

The media has a tendency to overly focus on the fact that people are Muslim in certain stories.

If a Muslim man had shot 3 college students, America would go crazy and cry “terrorist!”

In contrast, if a white man shot 3 white college students, then this story would’ve made the local news, but not almost every major news outlet.

The main point of interest in these stories is that the prejudice is implied.

“The irony, however, is that the many claims of too little media focus ensured that more attention was devoted to this crime than would ordinarily have been the case,” said Michael Cohen, a writer of The Boston Globe. “After all, a man gunning down three people in cold blood is a remarkably unexceptional event in modern America.”

The shooting could have been a hate crime, but it also could have been a man with mental issues going berserk over parking spaces.

“I hate Islam just as much as Christianity, but they have the right to worship in this country just as much as any others do,” stated Hicks in post from 2012 on the proposed construction of a mosque near the World Trade Center site.

If Hicks had shot the three college students because of a parking incident, then the wiring in his head is a bit tangled.

Journalists, today, are buried up to their noses with stories about crazy people.

There have been so many shootings in America, it’d be a struggle to count them all.

Perhaps this was a hate crime, but a shooting including Muslim victims does not automatically make it a hate crime.